Darpa Wants to Build "Big Brother" Blimp
First published by Defense Tech, March 12, 2004
Conspiracy freaks, hold on to your tin hats. Darpa may have publicly abandoned its creepiest programs, like Total Information Awareness. But the agency, holding its every-18-months conference this week in Anaheim, still has a project to make you run full speed into your bunker.
Darpa is starting the planning for a blimp, three times the size of Goodyear's, that would keep watch over an entire city.
Sitting at 70,000 feet above groud, the ISIS (short for "Integrated
Sensor is Structure") airship would use a giant, flexible
radar antennae to give, in the words of Darpa program manager
Larry Correy, a "dynamic, detailed, real-time picture of all
movement on or above the battlefield: friendly, neutral or enemy."
"We will apply this technology to track people emerging from buildings of interest
and follow them as they move to new locations," added Darpa's Paul Benda. "Imagine
the impact it will have if ISIS tracks the movement of individuals for months.
Hidden webs of connections between people and facilities will be revealed."
Such a system is meant to keep tabs on urban battlegrounds abroad, of course [silly us]. But, like Darpa's " Combat Zones That See " project, there's no reason ISIS couldn't float over New York or Chicago or Kalamazoo.
For now, hold off on buying that one-way trip to a secluded Caribbean island. ISIS is futuristic, even by Darpa standards. At the moment, the agency is only studying the feasibility of the airship. Darpa won't even begin soliciting research proposals until 2005.
A key problem to tackle: how to store energy for the blimp. Correy figures ISIS will need batteries ten times lighter than today's cells to stay aloft. Building the airship's enormous radar antennae - as large as the ship itself - is going to be a huge challenge, as well. The lightest space antennae weight 20 kilograms per square meter. For ISIS to work, that'll have to drop at least seven-fold.
© 2004 Defense Tech
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